AN INTERNATIONAL STUDY OF QUALITY IMPROVEMENT APPROACH AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

Investigates what approaches to quality lead to best quality and finan cial performance across different regions of the world. Reports a surv ey of 977 firms in Asia/South Pacific, Europe, and North America. Fift y-two items that suggest how a firm might improve quality were factor analysed and grouped into 11 factors, each factor a broader approach t o quality improvement than any one item. Actual quality was measured e ight different ways. Each approach to quality improvement (factor) was correlated to each quality measure, as well as to several financial m easures. The results suggest that a company's approach to quality corr elates to actual quality and to a lesser extent to financial performan ce. The major factors found to influence actual quality. were the orga nization's knowledge of quality management, its degree of customer foc us, and management involvement. When the task was to predict performan ce outcomes in any region, the specific factors that-best predict perf ormance were found to vary from region to region. That is, there were specific models within a region that better predicted performance than the model which predicted performance across all regions.